Final Report > Chapter 4: The Changing NHS 1984 - 1995 > A series of initiatives > The `Patient's Charter'

The `Patient's Charter'

26 A fourth initiative which we should note was the production in 1991 of the `Patient's Charter'. This Charter represented again an attempt to translate into the NHS a wider policy of defining in consumerist terms the standards to which the public was entitled in the delivery of public services. The Charter spoke in terms of patients having rights, for example to be treated within a specific period of time. It made no reference to the quality of the care to be provided. As Klein suggests, its importance lay not so much in its specific content as in the `new rhetoric and a new set of expectations in the NHS marking precisely the kind of shift of power from providers to consumers envisaged in the Griffiths Report'. [13] Of course, the `rights' in the `Patient's Charter' were not enforceable rights. To that extent, if targets were not met, there was no redress. Thus, although there was some reduction in waiting times and in the way hospitals conducted themselves, the change was one of rhetoric as much as action.

Footnotes

[13] Klein R. `The New Politics of the NHS' (third edition) London: Longman, 1995